William heard on the transistor that a low pressure front was approaching from the west. And that night it began to rain. It kept him awake until dawn – the unfamiliarity of it, the relentlessness – when he fell asleep, sleeping later than he had done since coming to the farm. It was still raining at eleven o’clock, and he realised, getting dressed, that he didn’t have the clothes for such weather. It had been a summer to persuade the unfortunate that in some ways they were not so. But now it was over. Looking west from the kitchen at the settled greyness, he couldn’t believe that yesterday it had been otherwise. Another country. He had eaten his lunch in the yard of the second hamlet, resting in the sun until mid-afternoon. Apart from the machinery, making the odd ticking or cracking sound after so many months of heat, it had been silent. Now the hamlets, landmarks throughout the summer, were barely visible, and the only sound was that of rain obliterating the lovely susurration of summer.
He stayed in the house until the rain stopped. That was not until the evening. Then he tucked his trousers into his socks, like a cyclist, and set off for the first hamlet. The paths he had made during the summer (he had grown proud of them, he realised) had already turned to mud and he slipped frequently. Once he fell, cursing, soaking the left leg of his trousers. A curse sotto voce, though, for he feared ungovernable cursing fits, the sense they had given him of being consumed, reduced to a pair of crazy lips uttering senseless words. Rather than curse he would slap his thigh and pause. He would turn on the transistor. (Rather than curse he would weep.) He found however that the transistor too had been affected by the weather. Stations which hadn’t failed him during the summer were indistinct now, remote behind rushes of static. Alarmed, he held the transistor at every conceivable angle. Occasionally voices would rise from the roaring silence before being claimed by it again. Fragments of information. “It has been decided, following a meeting of the coal …”
“Arbitration has been considered but …” “A lioness in a private zoo in Wiltshire has … more seriously than …” “An adequate contract, leading to the decision not to …” “the party … South Africa …” “Looting and burning, therefore, is expected for …” “Prayer can take many forms …” “Three hundred and two all out …” “The silkworm, given the correct …”
He walked on, gesticulating with the transistor, mimicking its broken communications. “The Queen Mother, keeping wicket for the Irish Guards …” “A bomb where all roads meet …” “The starving … the banquet …” “The grave …’’The presbytery, discovered in knots, claimed …” “The notoriety of the unknown drunk was such …” “There will be squalls and more squalls … disturbances …”
Nothing was to be gained from looking through the binoculars, either. What he seemed to see were the elements of obscurity. Vapours. A landscape without lines. Objects as abstracts of themselves. Green under grey under grey. Grey. The world’s inconsequence.
Ear and eye denied, he pulled the transistor and the binoculars round (truly as if he no longer had need of them) until they rested on his right side.
It was raining again when he reached the first hamlet. Was it one of those jobs which is bearable only in good weather? He looked across at the farmhouse, half a mile distant. The rain was getting heavier, slanting in from the west, now and then blowing into the barn where he sheltered, chilling him. Why had he imagined that the heat would last and that he would prosper with it? (The conditions of recovery couldn’t be that simple.) Brooding, perplexed, he did what he hadn’t done during the heat, climbed onto the high seat of one of the harvesters. There was more shelter there, but he was close to the corrugated iron roof, the loud drumming of the rain.
Already the rain had kept him awake, made him miss three tours of inspection, destroyed his paths. What other gains would be eroded? What other gains had there been? High on the harvester, feeling that he had been put there for the amusement of children, he fixed his gaze on the gap between the roof and the ground. He could see twenty yards of mud, and he could see that it was becoming deeper: from soil to subsoil, remorselessly. So what, though? Why should it trouble him so?
It was perhaps because his position on the harvester suggested a patient and dutiful worker that he felt, after about ten minutes, that something was being expected of him. Was he to speak? To go away? To attend to one of the machines? To … what? It was like the long silence – that silence which need never end – which follows a difficult question. He felt there was another presence – whether an individual or a group, he didn’t know – and that, yes, some account, some explanation, some demonstration … Immediately, too. The pressure was horrible. He shifted on the seat of the harvester, sat very still. He climbed down from it and stood at attention. A night and a day of rain and he had come to this. He walked out of the barn, collar up, hands in pockets. It was as if his temper had been a creation of the summer, his sense that he had built up reserves an expression of languor. A child of the climate; a mere organism.
The deep silences of the farmhouse had gone, banished by the drumming of the rain, and the rooms were no longer cool, but damp. For some reason he got it into his head that he should write to someone. “Dear friend,” he said aloud, “the long-expected rain has come at last …”
The rain continued. It got colder. William gave up his tours of inspection and stopped scanning the fields with his binoculars. His summer conscientiousness began to seem so ludicrous that on the fourth day of the bad weather he burst out laughing. From room to room then (as in search of the object of this sudden mirth), striding like one who sees that it is because of its vastness that he has not recognised his folly. Except that it was not really folly of which he felt he had been guilty. He couldn’t define his error – he couldn’t even be sure that there was one – but he was determined to hold himself responsible. At a stage like this wasn’t it either laughter or imprecation? And didn’t the latter presuppose fate and lead to emptiness? So long as he could be sure that fate didn’t have a stranglehold on him, there might be dignity even in loud and endless laughter (otherwise it would be the laughter of the damned – really, a kind of cursing). But it must not become endless laughter. Not yet. He found that he could stop it or at least modify it by turning on the transistor and writing a commentary on whatever he heard. His good days became those on which, for some reason, the programmes didn’t fade into the roaring silence which seemed to lie at the back of things, his bad days those on which that silence (words, phrases rising briefly like salmon from a river in spate) was dominant. He could amuse himself, but he could also alarm himself. (He could do both at once.) After a discussion of current events, for example (chaired by one who gave the impression of being embalmed in the present), he wrote: “What happens to an event when it isn’t current? Can it only be discussed if it is current? As it fades from currency, don’t we need historians? Are there no historians on the radio these days? Don’t we want their deadly revealing dexterity anymore?” Sometimes, startled by them, he would read his words aloud to himself, walking from room to room, but sometimes he couldn’t bring himself even to whisper them, so acid and indisputable did they seem.
When the rain stopped at last William set off for the village, for if he was to live on the farm in the winter he would need an anorak and gumboots. Outside too he was troubled by mirth. Hands in pockets, elbows pressed to his sides, he bent double, straightened, twisted this way and that, all the while walking. What kind of vagabond would he appear to be, to someone passing? He defended himself against the rawness of such a question by considering the signs of autumn, everywhere apparent after the days of rain: the chill, the leaves turning, the dank undergrowth, the birdsong – light, unsettled – hinting at migration. The colours in particular made him grave, as grave as he had known himself for days. And it was in a grave mood that he entered the village and approached the store. He understood his gravity, though less than he had understood his mirth. Was it simply a defence against laughter, its further reaches? Here he was, a man about to buy an anorak and gumboots (gloves too, perhaps) in order to make himself feel that the winter could be commanded, that in the driving rain and the freezing silences he could be significantly busy. Clothes as theatrical aids. At least in anorak and gumboots he could make new paths, paths to which the frost when it came – as it would, as it would – would give an illusion of permanence. He recalled his idea that he should have a small vehicle: that would make tracks of another kind. And if he had a camera as well, he could take pictures of all these tracks, make records. Why not? Did the store which he was approaching so gravely and uncertainly (the only movement in the street that of the wind on puddles) sell cameras? Why hadn’t he thought of it before? He quickened at the prospect, his hands – as though it was a well known camera shop and not an obscure store that he was approaching – coming eagerly from his pockets. He had denied himself the liberty to comment on what he heard on the transistor until confinement and despair had driven him to it. And he had denied himself the liberty to photograph his world until a vertiginous loneliness had compelled him to attend to his own tracks. There would be the traces and prints of birds as well, of course, and of animals. Even of animals long gone. A photographer of trails and traces, obscure residues, starts and false starts.
He emerged from the store with a blue anorak and a pair of gumboots. But he emerged also with a bottle of whisky, telling himself that it had been an afterthought (bought so suddenly!) but so horribly embarrassed that he had to admit that he might have been planning the purchase behind his own back. Standing quite still, he held the bottle by his side in a carrier bag, fancying that it had the meaningless weight, the irrelevant gravity, of a dead animal. Fancying, too, that it was perhaps for another. The terrible rapidity of such dodges. He watched with disgust as, like ants, the lies and evasions came and went, came and went: “A present … George and Sheila, the baby.” “Smash it on the first stone.”
“One drink only …” “Take it back …” But still he carried it, approaching the newsagent’s where he had been told he might get a camera, the presence of the bottle, though, having destroyed all sense that he had a right to a camera. “I will leave it in the shop,” he said, entering the shop, light from the resolution. “I will leave it here.” The thought of a bottle of whisky exchanged for a camera, however, brought back his mirth. A bargain struck in darkness. Shaking, caught between the two scales in which he was weighing his imaginable future, he had a whispered consultation with himself (not quite muffled entreaty, not quite sobbing either), turning the bookstand vigorously so that its loud squeaking would conceal his crisis.
The storekeeper was right: the newsagent did sell cameras. While William looked at one, a Kodak Instamatic, he manoeuvred the bottle of whisky with his feet into a gap between two crates of lemonade, all the time talking to the newsagent, who talked to him in return. He saw a pile of Glasgow Heralds and said that he would have one of these as well. He was tempted to add that it was the first newspaper he had bought in years, but after his performance at the bookstand (at one point, he had nearly overturned it) he thought that his reputation as a crank was high enough. Holding the camera, looking through the viewfinder, trying and failing to keep it steady, he suddenly had the feeling that the moment had been suspended. His gesture and he suspended, fixed, frozen. As though for his own contemplation. He was holding the camera with pride, he believed. And, indeed, surely he had won? How could he retrieve the bottle of whisky now without it seeming as if he was trying to steal some lemonade?
He left the newsagent’s and began to walk back the way he had come. A wind was getting up (heard in the trees before felt on the face), bringing spots of rain. Out of sight of the village, he stopped and put on his anorak, easing himself into the stiff material. High up, wheeling, touched by the sun that had deserted the earth, there were gulls and crows. William watched them for a moment, struck by the way the gulls’ spiral enclosed that of the crows. Then he walked on. He reckoned that he had owned the bottle of whisky for no more than ten minutes. Had he bought it, maybe, just to prove to himself that he could relinquish it? He had relinquished it. Indeed he had! He laughed out loud. It wasn’t the same as his recent laughter, however. If that had aspired to embrace the unbearable – his mother’s murder, the possibility that he had come to nothing again, the fact that he hadn’t seen his children for years – this was entirely of the moment. The bargain struck in darkness bringing light. Cunning against cunning. (Cunning against cunning against cunning, even.) His several selves. To trick himself in the process of tricking himself. A little triumph. It was no wonder that he felt tired, and that he stumbled slightly as he walked into the rising wind.
He was about a mile out of the village and walking briskly when he heard a car behind him. He moved onto the grass verge to let it pass. But it didn’t pass; it drew level, the driver sounding his horn. It was a green van, and after a moment William realised who it was. It was the newsagent. With one hand he was steering and with the other he was holding up William’s carrier bag with the bottle of whisky in it. He was also smiling. William made a gesture of disbelief and went on walking. The newsagent followed him in first gear, still (William was sure) smiling and holding up the carrier bag. He walked with an image of the helpful smile for about fifteen yards. Then the horn sounded again and he turned: the newsagent was looking puzzled now. Pretending surprise, habitual absent-mindedness, William reached through the window of the passenger door and received back the carrier-bag, thanking the newsagent in a low voice. With a wave the newsagent turned and went back towards the village, watched by William until he was out of sight. It was then very still. Even the wind seemed to have dropped. The gulls and crows still wheeled – spiral within spiral – but no longer touched by the sun, no longer dramatised in the mid-sky. William was looking down, swinging the carrier bag slowly backwards and forwards, very slowly, almost as though, unable to work out what he should do now, he was seeking peace in the simplicity of the pendulum.
A mile distant, almost midway between the village and the farmhouse, there was a clump of rhododendron bushes. William decided that when he reached them he would close his eyes, turn round in the road three or four times and, entering the bushes at random, place the carrier bag on the ground and withdraw. Eyes still closed, he would walk away, and after about seventy yards or so he would have no idea which bush hid the carrier bag. (He was as likely to look for the bottle after hiding it, he reckoned, as he was to buy a second after smashing the first.)
He carried out his plan with a vengeance, turning about several times in the road and then blundering into the bushes and abandoning the carrier bag. His face was scratched and his trousers torn and he feared for an instant that he wasn’t going to be able to find his way out again without opening his eyes. This made him desperate and desperation gave him great strength: he crashed out onto the road, steadying himself by waving his arms about, then staggering off in what he trusted was the direction of the farmhouse, behind his closed eyes a world of red darkness and white stars.
He feared that in the hierarchy of bargains with himself this abandonment of the whisky in the rhododendron bush came quite low; but he walked as if it wasn’t so, as if the appearance of the newsagent in the green van had been an illusion and as if strenuous walking would confirm this. But the result, he knew, was a walk which was almost crazy – arms and legs careless both of one another and of the space through which they moved. (If it is possible to walk as if trying to convince oneself that there is a space to walk through, this was William’s walk at that moment.) He saw it so clearly that he stopped and, bowing, holding out his camera and gumboots as though to an audience contemptuous of such things (he could have abandoned them easily, without qualms), he fell to cursing. It became one of his ungovernable fits, at its centre a creature without a will, shaped and reshaped quite arbitrarily from moment to moment, to each shape corresponding a curse, the shapes getting smaller and more pitiable, the curses more venomous therefore. He cursed until he had his feeling of having become a pair of mad lips. And even then he cursed – at his collapse into cursing – his final curse (he was bent double now) having itself by the throat.
He returned, walking with deadly slowness, to the rhododendron bushes, entering them – as in parody of his earlier ruse – with his eyes shut. He kept them shut. One stoop however and he had recovered the carrier bag.
He thought again how it had the irrelevant weight of something dead. It was a rabbit, eyes bulging with myxomatosis. It was a diseased salmon. It was a huge rat (he had killed it in the always inhospitable third hamlet). It was a lump of mud seething with white worms. It was excrement.
Such fancies might have continued (leading him, as his curses had done, to the very edge of himself) but for the sound of a car behind him. He had the thought that it was the newsagent again. Back in his shop, he had trained a telescope on William, had seen what had happened and, moved to pity, he was about to offer to take the whisky back again. It seemed almost likely, for the vehicle, as before, was reluctant to overtake. It drew level, its horn sounding.
“You look done in, William.” It was Sheila Weir. “If I take you home, will you give me some tea?”
“Sure,” William said, getting into the car and leaning back. “With pleasure.”
“I’ve been to the doctor with the baby,” Sheila explained, moving off. “She’s not been feeding well.”
“Nothing serious?”
“No, just colic. And you? Anything serious with you?”
“I’m desperate, it seems. Is that serious?”
“Probably. And you’re bleeding. Why?”
“I fell into a bush,” William said, still disposed to regard her impatience with mere chat as a sign that she was unusually sympathetic. “Congratulations on the baby, by the way. I should have been in touch. I’m sorry.”
“There she is behind you. Take a look.”
The baby was in a carrycot on the back seat, tightly swaddled and wearing a white bonnet. All that William could see was red skin, a mouth for sucking, closed eyes.
“What’s she called?”
“Karen,” Sheila said. “Tell me, though, how you came to fall into a bush? Have you been drinking?”
“No. I just tripped.” It was not quite a joke, not quite an evasion. He grinned, massaging his chin.
“I can’t imagine what you’ve been doing.”
The baby woke when she was being carried into the farmhouse. Sheila sat down and gave her the breast, watching William as, very deliberately, like one declaring himself, he set his purchases on the table. He made no kind of reference to the whisky but spoke instead of what he hoped to do with the camera. He hoped, he said, to photograph sunsets, trees, the brilliance of snow under sun, birds, the tracks of birds, stormy dawns. Sheila listened with amused attention, as if wondering when the list would end, head cocked above the sucking infant. William continued, speaking more and more excitedly. Every environment, natural or urban, deserved records, he said, deserved witnesses.
“I quite agree,” Sheila said. “Far better a photographer or a naturalist than a caretaker.”
“Yes …”
“There’s no doubt. You do realise, don’t you, that in the winter there’s virtually nothing to do here? You’ll be wasted.”
“I feared so. But there’s no alternative.”
“I don’t know. You could extend your knowledge of the elderly.”
“How?”
“Well, as you saw, they’re badly understaffed at the Montgomery. I could fix a post for you with matron, I think. I’ve some connections with the place, some influence. I’m due there this afternoon, in fact.”
“That would be extraordinarily good of you.” He said it very quietly, sitting down, as though suddenly exhausted. “Extraordinarily good of you.”
“Not at all. I’ll ring you tonight.”
“Would you do something else for me?” he asked, still in the same spent voice.
“If I can.”
“Would you, you and George, accept this bottle as a present? To mark Karen’s …”
“I’d be glad to, William. Thank you.”
“A small token … long overdue …”
“Thank you.”
“A pleasure.”
“Now you mustn’t feel,” Sheila resumed, taking the baby from her breast, grimacing slightly, “that you’re walking out on the job. There’s no job to walk out on. Really there isn’t. George knows it too. It’s no skin off his back. Anyway, you’re not a caretaker.”
“No.”
“That was kind of you,” she said, musing. “The whisky.”
February 4th, 1979
It would have surprised me, I think, had I been told that I would actually have an affair with Jennifer. But when it happened I wasn’t surprised. I seemed to have been waiting for it. On the face of it, it is an irresponsible and dangerous thing to do. It jeopardises my marriage; it might even be said that it jeopardises my job. How to explain it then? Well, I might start by saying that I’ve always wondered (I who have neither) at the coolness and ingenuity of those who have affairs. Where to meet, when to meet, how to meet, how to lie. How to lie: that is the most taxing part. I’m not at ease with my lies, though I have confidence in them. They work, they are effective, but with each one told – I sometimes fear – I undo a little more of myself. Not that I have to tell many, for it has always been my habit to work late two or three nights a week. Now, instead of working late, I go back to Jennifer’s flat. She lives nearby and it is simple. How could Margo find out? There are no lines to the office after five and should she pass and see the lights out I could say that I was on my way home.
Why has it happened, though? Am I not still in love with my wife, still fascinated by her, still awed by her family? I am, and I must say that the more I am unfaithful to her the more she fascinates me. She is so much more complex and sophisticated than Jennifer, so much more highly charged, so much more difficult to satisfy, and I don’t just mean sexually. A crude way of putting it would be to say that Jennifer is a holiday from Margo. Or a trial run for Margo. That is sometimes what I feel. I can make love to Jennifer without the sense that her being is a labyrinth, significant parts of which I haven’t had the imagination to enter. Almost always with Margo the parts I’ve failed to reach are the parts which apparently on that day in that month ought to have been reached. She never says so – she’s too considerate for that – but I feel it. I lie back with a deep sense of having failed her, of having lost my way in the foothills, fallen to my knees. True, I have sometimes thought that it is because she is my wife that I feel this – that I would feel it with anyone who was my wife. A reflection on marriage, that’s to say, its way of waterlogging relationships with vows, duties, obligations, rather than on Margo? It’s a theory; but I’m less and less convinced by it. I think that Margo will always be too much for me. Even in old age, with her belief that the days should be intelligently ordered (over the breakfast table, all options are reviewed), she will daunt me. She thinks, you see, that I have the makings of a lazy man. She says that if I don’t watch out I will become slack, then slacker, then unable to make any kind of impression at all. I’m troubled by this view, naturally, even though I don’t think I’ve done anything to deserve it. I’ve always worked hard at my present job and she knows that I’m held in high esteem there.
Well, I’m not working quite as hard or effectively as I used to. It’s not just that the time which I previously spent catching up, getting ahead, briefing myself, I now spend with Jennifer. It’s that even during office hours I’m not as decisive as I was. I hesitate more. (My double life interfering with the springs of action? The man I am with Jennifer and the man I am with Margo at odds, creating a kind of stutter in my approach to things?) One evening, as though trying to clear my head, recover my singularity, I worked late again, but the thought of Jennifer just round the corner was too much for me and after about an hour I gave up. The result is that I’m always slightly behind now. My boss, Geoffrey Archibald, realises it and no longer relies on me for instant information. I joke that it is premature middle age, but since he is distinctly middle-aged and I am not this doesn’t go down well. (His face has a shrunken look, as if he has long lived in expectation of being hurt, and his shoulders are hunched, as if this expectation has included a fear of actual physical hurt.) I repeat my joke, however, in one form or another, because I couldn’t possibly give the real reason. “Mr Archibald, Geoffrey, Jennifer and I are having an affair …” “Working together, close colleagues for some time, Jennifer and I have become involved. You know how it is.” Unthinkable. There can be no playing about with the immemorial sanctities where Geoffrey is concerned. A Protestant right down the line. Clean fingernails and tired hair.
I don’t think though that I’m more involved with Jennifer than I was when we were simply friends. Sex has not uncovered new emotions, I’m afraid, nor intensified old ones. She senses this and doesn’t like it, for it is not so with her. Each week her hopes and expectations increase, and there are times when this makes her as difficult in her way as Margo. A few times I’ve even found Margo a relief by comparison. She is so fiercely verbal, my wife, always aware of what is troubling her, always alive with explanations. Explanations! She is at her most intense when she cannot choose between two or three rival ones. Until she decides she is terribly restless. Then she will tell me why x or y is the most satisfactory one, the most imaginative. These moments of triumphant choice are usually marked by strong sexual desire: it is as if she enjoys a rush of energy each time she understands something and, generous as she is, seeks to share it even with one who may not quite have grasped the original dilemma, never mind its solution.
Jennifer by contrast tends to be listless in the face of her problems. She allows them to silence her. I have to provoke her into admitting them, and even then she does so in a way that exasperates me. It’s as though she can’t quite bring herself to accept that they are hers; as though they are problems which have been assigned to her by mistake, as a debt meant for Smith might be incorrectly assigned to Brown. I venture to explain her to herself, for which she thanks me, though she doesn’t like the fatherly tone I apparently adopt at these times. In truth my tone is Margo’s: not its vitality, perhaps, but its directness. The irony of this doesn’t escape me. Inspired by my wife’s intelligence to try and explain my mistress to herself! Am I that helpless? In the pub before I go home – the neutral ground between Jennifer’s flat and my own that can strike me as preferable to either – I look into my whisky and wish I could feel that there was a significant and enduring “I” in all this.